In a two-hour, laughter-filled talk at a Little Rock coffee shop near his Hillcrest home a few weeks ago, Ernest Dumas held forth on Hillary Clinton’s likability problem, the infamous Arkansas Democrat editor John Robert Starr and the jumbled state of journalism.

Matt Campbell, viewing Arkansas politics with the eyes of a liberal outsider trained in the law, has brought down three major public officials in the last two years because, he says, he doesn’t like bullies and he thinks people should play by the rules.

Didn’t Arkansans just vote for the kind of no-tolerance ban on wining and dining that State Legislatures Magazine gave us credit for? And yet there’s clearly a loophole in it big enough for a half-dozen open bars every day.

Members of a legislative panel on Wednesday looked at ways to expand Arkansas' open records law so taxpayers can find out more about spending in government contracts and possibly get access to other financial records now held in secret.

On Oct. 19, 1991, the newly christened Arkansas Democrat-Gazette landed on doorsteps and in the newspaper boxes of the state’s new media landscape. Having whipped its nemesis, the Democrat-Gazette pushed ahead, working to take in advertising dollars left homeless when the Gazette collapsed and selling the mantra, “The Best of Both.”

As I try to conjure the right words, and to say it all within the confines of the average reader’s attention span, the clock ticks ever so closer to this site’s final moments. I look at that clock like the condemned prisoner, knowing that they’ll flip the switch at 11:59 p.m. They’ll flip the switch off, cutting the current, however; and I’m only sweating getting this in by afternoon deadline, and knowing I’ll have another day, at maybe another website, to ply my trade. The last time I went through this, they (you know who “they” are) cut the power to the computers before we at the Arkansas Gazette had a chance to say any last words. It’s the winds of October and now early November that ever remind me of those strange days in 1991.